Twelve years after 9/11, a much healthier outlook on the terror threat

Twelve years after 9/11, a much healthier outlook on the terror threat

According to Reuter’s American sources, who seem much more forthcoming than the ones at the RCMP’s endlessly self-congratulatory Monday press conference, two Canadians wanted to blow up the joint VIA Rail/Amtrak Maple Leaf train that runs between Toronto and New York. Earlier stories quoted a source to the effect that the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge in Niagara Falls was the specific target, though this seems to be progressively disappearing from online copy. At first you’d think blowing up a border bridge would be tremendously difficult — but then, a boxcar did recently drift across it in the dead of night, and nobody noticed for 11 hours. Blowing up a train, though? That’s relatively small beans.

In recent relieved days, there has been an interesting, healthy and respectful debate over the necessity and the wisdom of essentially shutting down the entire city of Boston in the search for Dzokhar Tsarnaev. Obviously keeping everyone off the streets would theoretically aid the police operation — although it was only when the shelter-in-place recommendation was lifted that a Watertown resident found Tsarnaev’s hiding place — but as a public safety measure it seemed excessive. Life largely got back to normal in Boston on Wednesday, when nobody even knew who they were looking for. Police now say the brothers were planning more attacks. So it seems rather odd that they shut it all down again having killed one suspect and put the other one on the run.

In the end, I don’t really think it mattered: One day isn’t the end of the world. Presumably they would have had to let Bostonians out on Saturday if they hadn’t caught him on Friday. It says nothing good or bad about Boston or the United States that things turned out this way. As Jonathan Kay argued here, the “epic” response proves just how rare terrorism acts have been on U.S. soil since 9/11.

Still, I happen to buy that old chestnut about soldiering on in the face of terrorism being the best revenge. London never shut down completely during its 2005 Tube-bombing nightmare. The comedian David Cross used to tell a great story about a guy he saw in New York on Sept. 12, 2001, rollerblading through the smoky gloom on Houston Street in spandex shorts, a muscle T and a gas mask. “If Gabriel wants to rollerblade, Gabriel rollerblades,” Cross imagined the guy thinking to himself. “Because if Gabriel doesn’t rollerblade to the Chelsea Piers, then the terrorists have won.” It’s a bit ridiculous, but that kind of defiance is genuinely valuable.

Staying home and not answering the door, as Bostonians were requested to, is a serious reaction to a serious event. Here in Canada, we are faced with making a much calmer decision concerning a potentially serious event that didn’t happen. We rely on police, security forces and fellow citizens to be vigilant about terrorism threats, and that’s as it should be, because there will always be what terrorists would see as “weak points” in our day-to-day lives. The wonderfully named Operation Smooth — which does not so much strike fear as suggest busting some disco moves — concerns one of those weak points: VIA Rail. If someone acquires the suitcase- or backpack-sized means of blowing up a train, subway, bus or sidewalk, there is really very little to stop him from doing so.

In the case of air travel, we have accepted massive inconvenience as the price of near-total safety. There is no accounting for incompetence, but technology-wise we may well have reached the practical limits of what can be accomplished. Shoe bombs begat shoe inspections; liquid bombs begat a ban on liquids and gels in hand luggage; the gitch bomber begat the naked-body image scanners. I’ve said it before: When someone manages to blow up a plane using something he stuffed up his backside, we’ll finally be faced with the huge existential decision.

But thus far, to our credit, we have resisted the urge to expand these inconveniences to train travel, bus travel and mass transit — not because we feel immune there, I don’t think, but because for whatever reason it would simply strike us as unreasonable. Show up 90 minutes early for a train to Montreal, or a bus to Owen Sound? C’mon. We have lives to live here.

As of this writing, I haven’t heard a single mention of heightened security in the wake of Monday’s arrests. VIA’s press release simply stressed that “at no time was there an imminent threat to the VIA Rail passengers, employees or the general public” and left it at that. If these arrests had happened soon after 9/11, we all know how different things would have been. That’s progress.